TV channels Guadeloupe

Guadeloupe's television lives between two worlds: the French public service that has served the islands since 1964, and a lively layer of private local channels that grew up around it.

How television came to Guadeloupe

Television reached Guadeloupe in 1964, when the ORTF station was inaugurated on 22 December - its first presenters the familiar voices of Radio Guadeloupe, and its mainland programmes arriving by boat, days after broadcast. The station became FR3-Guadeloupe in 1975, took colour in 1978 and became RFO Guadeloupe in 1982, with advertising arriving in 1984; in September 1989 Hurricane Hugo brought down its transmitter and left the island without television for weeks. Today's public channel is Guadeloupe La Première, within France Télévisions, and the archipelago - with Saint-Barthélemy and Saint-Martin - has been fully digital terrestrial since the end of November 2011.

The private stations

The private era began, as in much of the French Caribbean, with pirate stations: Éclair Télévision first broadcast from Basse-Terre in 1985, and Canal 10 followed in 1986, both regularised only in 1998. Canal 10 still produces all of its own programming, in French and Creole; Alizés Télévision joined the field in 2015 under a former director of RFO Guadeloupe. ETV carries the Basse-Terre local tradition that Éclair Télévision began, and Radio TV Basse-Terre, with its studios above Trois-Rivières, covers the same southern shore - the news of Basse-Terre and Pointe-à-Pitre, the councils and the communes.

Music, the island's second language

Guadeloupe is the home of zouk - the sound the band Kassav' carried worldwide from the early 1980s - and its music channels show it: Madras FM TV is the screen side of Madras FM, the local radio of Creole and Caribbean hits, while RHT Guadeloupe and TMA run the island's soundtrack - zouk, kompa and dancehall - to screens at home and to the diaspora abroad.

From carnival season to the commemorations of May, Guadeloupe's channels serve an archipelago that lives between France and the Caribbean - Basse-Terre and Grande-Terre, Marie-Galante, Les Saintes and La Désirade - where the mainland's prime time and Antillean concerns share the same evening.